In the hour of not quite rain when the fog was fingertip high

I was glad bunny_hugger went to bed earlier Thanksgiving Eve than I did because it made it easier to sneak a surprise in. I get, occasionally, impulses to do little surprise things and that's probably the sort of thing bluerain was thinking of when warning that we could, as a couple, be a bit much. In this case ...

There's a Disney outlet store near home, so a fair if sometimes erratic mix of Disney theme products are available. One of the items I spotted was a small Stitch doll, just the right size to be snuck into a carry-on bag. It was a Thanksgiving-themed doll, putting the really appealing alien in a turkey costume with knife and fork held eagerly at the ready. So before going to bed I got that out and set it up on the dining room table, ready for an enthusiastic morning greeting.

I slept in later than she did, but I was fairly sure I knew how she'd grin on seeing it, so I didn't really miss the moment of discovery. I'm also sure I was right on how she looked at it. And, as she observed, Stitch looked a bit overly eager to get to the business of eating turkey while dressed as a turkey. But cartoon-iconographic animals are full of weird cannibalism-approaching moments anyway. And Stitch does seem like the sort of person who goes overboard in holiday celebrations and probably looks for excuses to dress for them.

There wasn't much to do before bunny_hugger's parents arrived --- while she was hosting dinner, the making of everything would be partly things she prepared and partly things they prepared and brought over, all to be baked to completion in her small but ready kitchen. We had (really good) bagels for breakfast and reading Usenet in the morning and kind-of watching some channel which was airing Disney's Hercules, which I just don't see as a seasonal Thanksgiving movie-on-TV. Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown is, but that's actually for the Day After Thanksgiving, which WTAF/Channel 29 in Philadelphia insisted on showing annually for some reason for a stretch there in the 80s. And yet again, weirdly, I felt the need to go upstairs and dress up --- using the same slacks but a different dress shirt from Tuesday --- at just the right time to catch her arriving parents looking my most grown-up.

bunny_hugger was worried about the ways this Thanksgiving wasn't being a traditional one for me: I wasn't with my family, for example, and in deference to her vegetarian habits and her parents' efforts to be more vegetarian there wouldn't be turkey, or even the tofu-imitation of turkey. I felt she worried excessively: for one, I already spent five of the Thanksgivings this past decade on a non-North American continent, and of one of the remainder my parents were away (the pitch of taking a cruise to Turkey for Thanksgiving they found irresistible). Spending the day with my parents would be nice, but it's not essential to my feeling connected to them. And I do try to eat more vegetarian these days, particularly with her, so it didn't feel like giving anything up. A vegetarian meat loaf instead of turkey may be a slightly bigger variation, but there've been enough Thanksgivings I hadn't eaten anything particularly turkey-oriented that again I didn't mind. (There were a few Singaporean Thanksgiving days that I forgot about it until, of course, just after dinner, even with restaurants offering set meals for the American expatriates.)

What I did feel a little awkward about was that there wasn't much for me to do in vaguely helping around the kitchen. Once we had the dining room table set up --- and that was nearly all finished by the time her parents arrived --- what remained was putting things into or out of sources of heat. There were some more complicated pieces, like getting the sweet potatoes cooked, that called for more, but I realized as bunny_hugger and her parents worked familiarly in the kitchen to get things ready that they have a kitchen grammar I don't really know. Here also a bit of my lingering family tradition caught me up: our major kitchen rule, particularly for complicated-cooking meals like Thanksgiving and Christmas, is that there's one person in charge of the kitchen, typically my mother for the big holidays and my father for more ordinary meals, and you do not enter the kitchen except at this person's direction, and when this person calls on you you follow directions. I couldn't quite figure out who to listen to for permission to enter the kitchen, or whose directions to follow, although they seemed to have everything under control.

Perhaps this also fits under the world of slightly different traditions: they slice meat loaf surprisingly thick, by my family's standards. I think this reflects the difference in family sizes. bunny_hugger has just the one sibling, while I've got three. We had to slice meat loaf thin to be sure everybody got a slice and there was room for seconds; and now, even though it's rare that as many as two of the kids will be at dinner with my parents, we still slice the old-fashioned way. I hoped I didn't look too gape-eyed at hefty slices of loaf offered to my plate.

Also not familiar to me was the sweet potato/marshmallow casserole, with a layer of marshmallow between two layers of sweet potato and then more marshmallows laid on top. It's a good thing that I had not encountered this before, and can't be bothered to actually cook my own meals, as otherwise I would pretty much eat this and nothing else ever.

It was another good meal, though, and another nice time talking with her parents sometimes comparing notes on how family traditions compared. bunny_hugger's brother wasn't able to come back home for the day, which was a bit of a disappointment and would put off at least until New Year's the time that he and I might ever meet even though he's just over in Brooklyn. Also unfortunately we'd run out of boxes of chocolate mints swiped from the Overflow Hotel, which her father had really liked on Tuesday and which her mother appreciated too. We had a few empty boxes left over, but that just reminded all of how tasty the chocolate mints were.

There was a slightly complicated process after dinner of dividing up leftovers, which I realized was completely unfamiliar to me: the problem just hasn't come up in my family. This involved a good bit of finding suitable bowls and plates from bunny_hugger's stock, not to mention moving things into and out of the microwave and even putting a few dishes on top of the (closed-lid) garbage bin because there wasn't enough counter space.

That last bit, setting a few dishes on the garbage bin, would lead to a shock during dessert filled otherwise with really good pie (pumpkin and pecan) and cream (whipped and ice, respectively). While talking and figuring on whether we really should have a little more there was a sudden crash. The meat loaf pan and a casserole dish, of bunny_hugger's parents, that had been left on the bin and overlooked after had finally slid off and shattered. I felt awful for noticing the dishes but not moving them when counter space allowed; bunny_hugger's father was devastated, as he'd set them there.

Adding a little extra insult to the loss of nice dishes that'd been in their family for ages, we'd divided the meat loaf and the stuffing so that this destroyed their leftovers. We encouraged them to take half of what was left, but they wouldn't have it, and we couldn't talk them into a more reasonable position. bunny_hugger's mother was reasonably upbeat about the dishes, pointing out that they're just dishes, after all, but still.

Still, even counting the loss of the dishes against it, the day went happily, and the fire was long-lasting and satisfying in a way that the convenience of my parents' gas-fired fireplace doesn't match and that I don't think is just the smell of a wood fire. And we settled in the evening to watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, always a pleasant touch to Thanksgiving, even if we didn't have jellybeans.

Trivia: A cranberry bubble begun in 1863 would drive prices of Pine Barrens land up to over $100 an acre before the price collapsed. Source: This Is New Jersey, John T Cunningham.

Currently Reading: The Fallen Colossus: The Great Crash Of The Penn Central, Robert Sobel. You can't say he isn't giving adequate background when the story of the failed 1968-70 merger of the Pennsylvania Rail Road and the New York Central starts with a failed 1792 canal project near Lake Ontario.